Several US embassies in Europe have ditched the traditional election night parties this year to avoid the cringe of the festivities that followed Trump's first victory. The incident, recalled by Politico , is a metaphor for what will happen to Europe now that Donald Trump is back at the White House.
Trump's geopolitical intentions and preferences, or lack thereof, have been known since his first term. The relative disengagement from NATO and the war in Ukraine, a thornier transatlantic trade relationship, an even thornier take on global warming, and the kind of weakness for or affinity with dictators like Putin and authoritarian leaders like Orbán are things that informed circles have already taken note of. All these things, and others, are forcing Europe to a geopolitical awakening that is necessary anyway in the new multipolar global context.
What the European Union has to do is also predictable. The clearest consequence is a greater and more coherent effort for the conflict in Ukraine, as support for that country begins to dwindle among the electorate, for example. The dynamics of the EU-US-China triangle will also change, and the European Union will try to manage and even take advantage of the "threat" of China's production surplus, while Trump also wants to create a "wall" of customs duties between that and the American economy.
However, it is not only about specific issues. Beyond the need for a certain geopolitical stance on a particular issue, we know that the European Union simply needs a stance in general. Both the undersigned and many others have repeatedly mentioned the way things tend to get stuck in the European Council, which needs unanimity for important decisions, as well as other "constructive defects" of Brussels as it is currently defined by the EU treaties. From this point of view, the "party was over" long before the evening of November 5-6, and signs of awakening started to appear at least along with the war in Ukraine.
The far right in Europe and Trump's victory
It is interesting, on the other hand, to what extent the European political Zeitgeist will change, affected anyway by a rise of right-wing radicals and extremists in the ECR (the so-called conservatives and reformists) and Patriots for Europe. An event like the political change in the US is definitely “grist to the mill" of the political groups that follow these trends. In the short term, the European Union already decided in the June elections, and the center has kept its majority quite comfortably, even though important countries like Italy are governed by right-wing radicals. In the long run, however, a victory like Trump's will lead to the articulation and fusion of the rather motley and local political ideas of such parties. This is what Trump himself, who is not exactly an ideologue, needs right now.
The problem is whether such trends can be articulated to the point where they become a valid political offer for a reasonable majority, which will repeatedly propel them to power. If we want to see what could happen, it is very interesting to look at Viktor Orbán's Hungary. In a volume that will soon be published in Romanian by the Humanitas publishing house, "The Genius of Pannonia", the historian Stefano Bottoni argues very convincingly the idea that Orbán is a leader with outstanding tactical skills and a kind of reverse or alternative visionarism, which make him not only dangerous for democracy, but also a kind of political magnet for other leaders with authoritarian compulsions.
The National Cooperation System (NER) created in Hungary by Orbán – a hybrid of political program, constitutional superstructure, mafia octopus and propaganda machine – is an innovation (in a bad way) worth studying. Educational institutions such as the Matei Corvin College or the think tanks serving the Orbánist power are beginning to become productive on a global scale, schooling individuals with power ambitions from everywhere or inoculating "alternative" ideas. Orbán was the first to take certain steps towards authoritarianism that are plausible for the 21st century – a subservient justice system or the control over the democratic media are the first examples that come to mind, because they have since happened in other places as well – creating a kind of road map to what he calls illiberalism.
Of course, Orbán will know how to take advantage of Trump's victory, and he already blew him some kisses on X/Twitter even before the approval of the election result ("The biggest comeback in US political history!"). We can, of course, expect an initiative regarding a less than honorable peace in Ukraine and more pressing regional ambitions for the Hungarian leader.
Europe's surprising anti-Trump
To know what will happen in Europe, we need to know what the Americans actually voted for. In a pertinent commentary in the "Financial Times", Edward Luce states that Trump’s second victory can no longer be treated as an accident and we must simply acknowledge that US voters want what Trump is offering them: mass deportations, the end of globalization, "the middle finger to the liberal elite's often self-parodying approach to identity, better known as wokeness."
The middle finger raised by Trump’s voters is a kind of "cut the bullshit”. To what extent does such "bullshit" concern us in Europe? Interesting in this sense is the observation made by Ezra Klein of The New York Times, who said, shortly before the election, in a podcast with Jon Stewart, that the American Democrats have become a party of technocrats rather than a party of the Left, while the Republicans represent a kind of nativism or tendency towards authenticity. America's liberal elite are proposing a kind of "science-based governance”, and here things are starting to look quite a bit like the European Union, with its endless armies of policy experts, its more technical nature than that of the national governments, and its very complicated decision-making mechanisms, designed with the intention of securing the processes leading to the political act.
We can just look at a photo of Ursula von der Leyen to realize that from this point of view she couldn’t be more different than Trump. She is much more like Kamala Harris, and not because of her gender, but as a promoter and symbol of a current of thought that lost spectacularly in America on November 5, but was easily confirmed by Europeans in the June elections. We should not be misled by the fact that von der Leyen is a right-wing, Christian Democrat politician, while Kamala Haris claims to be from the American left. In the classical sense, the European ideological spectrum is completely shifted to the left compared to the American one, and the politicians from the European People's Party (EPP) are exactly the "Europe’s technocrats", the ones who have lead, in coalitions, the continent, and have formed the European Commissions for decades .
However, the similarities between Ursula von der Leyen and Kamala Harris end here. While the latter turned out to be a synthesis product launched at the last minute by the American Democrats, whose offer failed to convince even the various identity groups on which she was counting, von der Leyen reconfirmed herself without any doubt as "President of Europe" in this year's expeditious campaign. And this difference is based precisely on a political offer at the same time surprising and convincing, that of the EPP, which puts a strong emphasis on issues such as migration or Europe's defense capability. Geopolitical issues, a chapter in which Europe has suffered and continues to suffer.
So far, the European political center, with its EPP locomotive, has managed to convince the electorate with such things, limiting the scope of action of the questionable right, and it seems that it will very easily set in motion the new Von der Leyen Commission, that is, the policy engine of the continent. From this point of view, Trump's victory in the US only clarifies things from Europe's perspective. Trump can be blamed for anything, but not for the fact that Europe no longer can or should hide under an American umbrella, no matter how brutally and stupidly he formulated that with threats regarding NATO and its funding.
Europe's hope and the big "if" of that hope
On our continent, therefore, there is hope that things will move in a good direction, especially since the strange, consensual and postmodern "empire" we live in has already shown remarkable signs of awakening, such as the attitude towards the conflict in Ukraine, and the ideas of revising the treaties and the functioning of the Union begin to be voiced loudly at higher levels. It's also a kind of "cut the bullshit", but which comes not from the American voters, but from the European political center.
All these hopes, however, also contain a huge "if". We can realize it by recalling an incident, from the beginning of the first von der Leyen Commission, called COVID. At the time, the European Union had to invade an area of almost 450 million inhabitants with as many doses of vaccine. For this purpose, the vaccine had to be invented in record time, manufactured as fast, procured according to an impeccable supplier selection procedure and, moreover, at the lowest price. Somehow, Europe managed to do it, and even offer vaccines to countries outside the Union. It’s not a personal victory for Ursula von der Leyen, but it happened during her term. However, the problem and the big "if" appear in the fact that more recently, the head of the Commission started being investigated for a number of text messages that she allegedly exchanged with one of the vaccine manufacturers.
Texting is obviously "bullshit" compared to Donald Trump's criminal convictions. We do not know, and may never know, whether that exchange was innocent or not, although it occurred after the above impossible list of requirements was met. The story highlights a huge level of expectation from the electorate, who implicitly govern the mechanisms and rules of the continent. If they become unsustainable, the system, or at least the center, shuts down. The European Union can go downhill not because of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, but if Europeans do not correctly establish their demands from politicians, their idealism and dreams.
Postscript on Trump's victory and Romania
As I said on Veridica.ro not long ago, a more isolated America, that of Trump, could, to a certain extent, deprive Romania of its political compass. The strategic partnership with the USA is really a priority for us, and not a just bombastic, official announcement. Romania is close to the conflict in Ukraine, where Trump can cause a disengagement. The American intelligence community may become less interested in its Romanian counterparts, and our politicians have the degree of vision and clarity that we all know. Of course, it is difficult for this to put us on an authoritarian or pro-Russian trajectory, in itself, because we are proven centrist and Europositive, but it is not exactly good news.
Added to this is another thing, related to the possible rise in form of Viktor Orbán and his regional ambitions as a favorite of Trump - or one of them. Stefano Bottoni reports in the mentioned volume that Tușnad and the conferences in our ethnic Hungarian area are a kind of ideological cradle for Viktor Orbán, the place where he first stated "illiberal" ideas that were not taken into account at the time. And the Hungarian minority in Romania is very important for the nationalist component of Orbán's ideological edifice, along with the other massive one in Slovakia.
Bottoni convincingly suggests that this does not raise territorial issues at the moment, in that Orbán is concerned with Hungarians beyond the borders in a way similar to Putin's, and not only his, concept of "ruskii mir", the Russian world. That is, in the sense of a cultural and influential community and a grand dream delivered to the Hungarian electorate. Hungary has no armies to invade neighboring countries, and probably no such ideas in the short term. However, the actions of influence will very likely intensify, if we exclude the hypothesis of any collapse of Orbán in Hungary. And the fact that when we talk about "russkii mir" Ukraine naturally comes to mind is not very comfortable.
